Here's how my niche SaaS company structured our SEO strategy

I run marketing at a venture-backed SaaS company and wanted to share with you guys some of the ways that we (and many other SaaS companies) go about in order to create a comprehensive/effective SEO strategy.

--Let's fictitiously say that my company offers a CRM for Animal Shelters.--

IMO, the SEO strategy begins with and comes down to the keywords you intend on targeting. And I break these down into two groups. Direct and Indirect.

Direct: Keywords used to search for the specific tools and benefits I offer
Indirect: Keywords used by my target audience to educate themselves

For this post I will focus on direct keywords as those bring the hottest leads. But before moving on, I'll just mention that indirect keywords can be targeted via an optimized and VALUABLE blog.

Back to the direct. Most SaaS companies are not targeting thousands of keywords with dozens or hundreds of pages. In our case, we're targeting 110 keywords at this point, distributed across 10 pages. 10 pages because that's the most amount of "topic buckets" I could possibly imagine in order to grab as much attention as possible. 110 keywords because I had to put my best effort into figuring out every possible way people might search for my product or part thereof.

You see, niche SaaS companies are in a bind. We're going up against extremely low volume. Of our 110 keywords, 13 are estimated to have over 100 searches per month, 38 (inclusive of the 13) are estimated to have 10+ searches per month. Everything else is estimated at 0, aka the estimate you get when search volume is way too low to care.

So if my keywords are going to have <10 searches per month, I better make damn sure I cover every way someone might search that term, and in the aggregate, I am capturing a bigger volume.

So, with the animal shelter CRM example, let's say I have a keyword "Shelter Adoption Application Automation" which corresponds to a landing page dedicated to that functionality.

Here are some alternatives I might want to target:
Dog Adoption Application automation
Cat Adoption application automation
Shelter Adoption Application Software
Dog Adoption Application Software
Automate Adoption Applications For Shelter
......

If each variation get's 3 searches per month, in the aggregate I can potentially grab the attention of dozens of searchers.

The beneficial flipside of low volume is that not many websites will be particularly strong for a longtail keyword. So you are able to target a number of variations in your landing page.

So, long story short, come up with keywords, cover the entire longtail by using variations, and create a small number of landing pages to target those keywords.

Here's how one could think up these topic buckets for the landing pages.

Your main product and its functionality/features.

The product is CRM for Animal Shelter (and that is certainly your main topic bucket, and probably what your homepage is targeting). But if you look deeper, that software is actually comprised of many individual tools.

1- Adoption Application Automation
2- Vaccination tracking
3- Automated posting to Adopt-a-pet and similar sites
4- Donation Soliciting Automation
5- Reporting

Each one of these 5 tools might be something your target is searching. Make 1 landing page for each and figure out every possible way someone might search for this specific functionality.

Benefits
Benefits (think impact) is another way. In our example we might target:

1- Adopt dogs faster
2- Euthanize less animals

You can think about these as overall benefits, they may not fit exactly within one of the tool focused pages because these may be benefits that are realized from the combination of the various tools and features.

You might be thinking; 'But Edge, these are similar to the keywords you called indirect and suggested to target via the blog.' You would be right. They are similar, but not exactly alike. Make a list of your software's benefits, and see which ones make sense to target with a landing page. And after all it's not an exact science. You can make the decision of whether to go with a landing page or a blog post.

Bonus:
Competitor names
If you have competitors who are more popular than you, you should attempt to rank immediately below them for their names. You can do this with comparison pages.

Competitor comparison pages have tons of merits, ranking number two to your competitor's name is definitely a big one!

Double Targeting
In our niche, there was two major of labeling our main product. Instead of stuffing both of those keyword buckets, all of their variation keywords into the homepage, we broke it down into two topic buckets. One was targeted with the home page, and the other was targeted with an "overview" page.

At the end we had

Home
Overview
---Tool 1
---Tool 2
---Tool 3
---Tool 4
.........

Really hoping this is helpful for some of you guys and gals! Hit me with questions!